Category: RTK GPS

The compass drives two very costly design constraints into the robot lawn mower:

The need to minimize the number and size of steel or ferrous parts in the design.

The need to separate the compass from the motors to prevent electro-magnetic interference.

To address the first constraint, I selected a 5000 or 6000 series aluminum for the robot chassis and deck. That is quite costly both from a material standpoint and from a fabrication standpoint. And ultimately, you’re going to have some amount of steel in your robot. You can’t avoid it.

The second constraint requires the compass to be raised above the motors to a level high enough to get it out of the magnetic field created by the motors. Because I’ve placed the flight controller and other electronics in the same control box with the compass, several wires have to be run between this box and the power box. Shielding those wires is going to be tricky. Long story short, it creates lots of secondary design inefficiencies.

Reading through the forums and in my own research, I’ve come across a few interesting anecdotes:

Kenny Trussell reports that when steel mower blades begin to spin at high RPMs, the compass heading begins to drift by some amount, about 20º.

Christopher Milner had to place a 4ft tall mast on his vehicle to sufficiently separate his compass from the noise created by two drive motors and one brushless DC motor.

Unplugging and disabling all compasses on my wheelchair robot doesn’t cause any EKF errors, and after traveling a few feet in the wrong direction, the robot corrects its heading somehow, without the compass. I suspect the wheel encoders aid this process.

In light of this information, I am beginning to question whether I even need a compass. It seems to be creating more problems that it solves. The bad compass health error messages in Mission Planner are starting to get very annoying, even though they don’t usually seem to impact the robot wheelchair’s ability to navigate properly.

According to U-Blox, you can use two ZED-F9P modules configured as a moving base-rover combination to calculate the vehicle’s heading. Even with a spread between the antennas of 10in, U-Blox says the heading accuracy is 0.8º. Some folks on the Ardupilot forum are starting to investigate using the modules in this way, and I suspect it will be a much more accurate way to obtain the vehicle’s heading.

I’ve had enough bad luck with compasses that I’m willing to get rid of them altogether and use the ZED-F9Ps for heading exclusively. This allows some significant improvements to the robot design. I guess I’ll head back to the drawing board for the time being…

I may not be able to afford a Emlid Reach RS2, but I’ve got a cordless drill and an Amazon Prime account, dang it!

Putting my RTK base station on the mailbox works pretty good, but it takes a while to set it up and it’s not very robust. Using it in this manner results in a few problems:

The cell phone battery pack that I use to power to the receiver turns off after a while. I’m not sure if this is because the receiver only draws ~120mA of current and it doesn’t detect the receiver, or if it just times out. Either way, it’s quite annoying to discover the reason I can’t get an RTK fix or float is because the base station isn’t even on.

The neighbors getting their mail usually block enough satellite signals to cause the receiver to lose an RTK fix. Cars driving down the street will often affect the quality of reception, too. Unfortunately, I can’t pick up the mailbox and move it to a more favorable location.

The receiver and antenna are exposed to the elements. While I usually use them in good weather, I would like to be able to use them without having to worry about risking damage to the units from rain, wind, and the Kansas critters.

When I’m out testing in the parking lot there’s not an equivalent of my mailbox out there for me to set the receiver on. The roof of my car doesn’t count because it’s not geostationary. I’d like to have a way to repeatably locate the receiver when I’m testing in the parking lot.

Maybe I’m paranoid, but I’m always worried about some punk kid walking off with the base station module when it’s not within my line of sight. The punk kid I used to be in my teenage years would have done something malicious like that. It’d be great if I could make it a little bit more difficult to steal.

With these goals in mind, I decided it was time to build a real base station. One like the Emlid Reach RS2, but doesn’t cost me $1,899.

A Glorified Enclosure

The Emlid guys are geniuses. They basically took an RTK GNSS chip they can buy in bulk for $150 a piece, slapped it in a super nice thermoplastic case, developed an app that is more or less equivalent to U-Blox’s U-Center, and then stuck a price tag of $1,899 on it. I’m embarrassed I didn’t think of doing it myself.

They do offer some nice benefits with that $1,899 price tag, such as integral Wi-Fi and data logging capability, but in my humble opinion, those features aren’t worth what they’re charging. Realistically, I need a tripod, a mostly waterproof enclosure, a lead acid battery with a charger, and a cover for my GNSS antenna. Something like this:

My version of the Emlid Reach RS2.

I have a 12V lead acid battery and charger I stole from an old weed eater that I intend to use for this enclosure. The battery is rated for 3.6Ah, and according to the Ardusimple website, the board consumes 600mW at 5V, so 120mA of current. That would mean you could keep the Ardusimple board on for 30 hours. Not too shabby! I don’t know if they’re including the radio current consumption in those numbers, but even if it’s twice the 600mW they listed, we should be in good shape.

I’m still learning how to use these GPS modules, so I want to have access to the micro USB port that lets me communicate with them via U-Center. I found one of these cables for that purpose. I want to be able to interface with the board without opening the enclosure.

The guys that designed the Ardusimple boards were very forward thinking, and they made them such that you can power the board from any port or all the ports. The board has two micro USB ports, one for GPS data and the other for debugging the XBee radios. I don’t anticipate needing to use the XBee port often, so I am going to power the board with it instead.

To step down the 12V to 5V the board needs, I am going to use one of these DC to DC buck converters. Instead of two wire leads for the 5V output, it has a micro USB connector. Very handy. This converter should plug and play right into the XBee micro USB port.

One concern I have with it is RF interference. I’ve read some comments saying these converters don’t play well with FM radios. The way my enclosure is designed, I’ve got it sitting right below the Ardusimple board. GPS signals are in the 1.5GHz range if I remember right, so maybe we’ll be okay.

I’d like to use a tripod that’s stouter than your consumer grade camera tripod. Ideally it would have a hook under the center that I can hang a plumb bob from to make sure I’m setting the tripod up in the same location every time. I found a tripod that appears to fit the bill on Amazon.

A survey grade tripod that looks promising. The 5/8-11 UNC stud is stout, but a little inconvenient.

Most survey grade tripods appear to have a 5/8-11 UNC threaded stud, so I’ve used a low profile cap screw with a coupling hex nut to mount the enclosure on the tripod.

The coupling nut used to interface the enclosure with the tripod.

Last but not least, I need a way to protect the antenna as it sits on top of the enclosure. I opted for the OEM antennas that Ardusimple sells for the simple reason that all the other antennas they offered came with no less than 5m of extra cable. Yikes. Where would you put all of that cable? The OEM antenna cable was 30cm long.

The downside to the OEM antenna is that it doesn’t have any protective case. I could have 3D printed something, but I like to keep things simple. I really just need a dome looking thingy to cover it.

It’s kind of amazing what Google can find if you type “plastic dome” into the search field. At least for me, it turned up this on the first page of results. Pretty much exactly what I’m looking for. I intend to use a modified pipe gasket and some rubber washers for an approximately water tight seal.

The dome is about an eighth of an inch thick, so to make sure it doesn’t attenuate the GPS signals too much, I did a little test where I put a similar plastic bowl over the receiver. It affects the signal strength only marginally.

Last but not least, every GPS antenna needs a good ground plane. Sparkfun sells a 4in diameter ground plane for $5. It’s 0.125in thick steel which is a bummer for drilling holes through, but it beats routing the circular profile out of a piece of bar stock.

Bill of material for the poor man’s RTK GPS base station. The items I have on hand have a zero quantity.

Total cost? Should be under $200, depending on shipping for all these items. You too can have a Emlid Reach RS2 for the low, low price of $200.

I have decided that I need to refine the wheelchair robot’s ability to navigate accurately and robustly before I shell out a few thousand dollars to build the robot lawn mower. The goal here is to have the wheelchair robot “mow” my lawn before I invest in the actual robot lawn mower. If the wheelchair robot can’t do it, the robot lawn mower doesn’t have much of a chance, either.

So I’ve spent most of my time testing the wheelchair robot and the RTK GPS system. I have been typically placing the base on my community mailbox because it is geostationary, has a large metallic surface to prevent multipath, and a decent view of the sky.

The base station, located on top of my community mailbox. The green disk is the antenna. Neighbors give me funny looks when they go to get their mail.

Surprisingly, I was able to get several RTK Fixes partially underneath my large maple tree in my front lawn. While in RTK Fixed mode I had the rover running a mission with 10 waypoints in a 3m diameter circle. I cranked down the waypoint radius to 0.3m to try and make sure the robot was accurately traveling to each waypoint.

The circular mission in my front lawn. The satellite imagery is from winter time. GPS in blue is the U-Blox Neo-M8N, GPS2 in green is the U-Blox Zed-F9P, and POS in red is the calculated position by the EKF.

The map above shows some calculated positions prior to obtaining the RTK fix and after the RTK fix is lost.

The view from the ground. The mailbox in the picture is where I have the base station sitting.

There is some offset between the satellite imagery and the actual location on the ground, which makes things a little confusing, especially when planning a mission close to many obstacles. I almost ran into my neighbor’s basketball goal after I lost my RTK fix.

To give you a better idea of the quality of the fix, here is the latitude reported by the GPS receivers and the blended location as calculated by the EKF:

The latitude reported by the U-Blox Neo-M8N, U-Blox Zed-F9P, and the EKF position estimate in blue, green, and red, respectively.

The RTK fix in the graph above is first obtained at 18:06:15 and is maintained intermittently until about 18:14:12. The reported HDOP for both GPS receivers was close to 0.7, but despite this, I am impressed that by default, the EKF is giving much more weight to the RTK solution. You can see this in the graph: the red and green lines are much closer than the blue line.

The oscillations in the graph above are from the circular mission I was running. It looks like I had a pretty good RTK fix from about 6:09PM to about 6:13PM. This was about 11 laps about the circle.

Some additional information about the fix status:

The fix status across time. 6 is an RTK Fix, 5 is RTK Float.How much time was spent in each fix status.

I don’t want to oversell these results, because they weren’t typical of the entire afternoon. I spent a good chunk of time running the wheelchair robot in Acro mode tuning the throttle and steering parameters, and I wasn’t able to get an RTK fix throughout that time. It’s very much a patience thing.

The weather the past two weekends has been good enough to take the robot out for some testing with the new RTK GPS system. The Ardusimple boards are pretty awesome. The things I like about them:

It is plug and play with the Pixhawk (mostly).

It is configured to automatically survey in the base location. This means you don’t have to mess with U-Center and configure it out of the box, unless you want to plug in specific coordinates.

The long range radios I ordered mean you don’t have to mess with injecting the RTCM data stream through telemetry, although I will eventually attempt this.

Those things I like are huge. A few minor things I didn’t like:

The connector on the board is technically the correct Pixhawk connector, a JST-GH 6 pin connector. Which is great, but every Pixhawk I’ve seen has DF13 connectors. So I had to buy an adapter cable.

And then I had to mod the adapter cable because apparently the pinouts are inverted between the DF13 and JST-GH connectors. Frustrating.

The antenna choices offered by Ardusimple included a nice IP65 antenna and a unenclosed one. Initially I wanted the IP65 antenna, but then realized it came with a 5m (!) long cable. Where are you supposed to store 15ft of wire on a robot like this? So I went with the unenclosed version with a 10cm long cable.

The robot wheelchair with the RTK GNSS antenna mounted to the top enclosure. The second longer antenna is for RTCM corrections from the base station.

Once you tweak the adapter cable, you can plug it in to your Pixhawk and get RTK positioning in no time flat! Very awesome. No need to even tweak anything in mission planner. It will interpret RTK float and RTK fixed messages from the rover module.

To set up a base station, I grabbed my charcoal grill, a micro USB DC adapter, and an extension cord.

The base station is on the grill. The thought was the metal shell would make a good ground plane to mitigate multipath.

And it worked pretty well until the rover tried to ram it in auto mode. Not cool, robot wheelchair. Not cool.

Another issue is that my backyard is a crappy GPS environment. It was pretty easy to get an RTK fix when stationary, but in motion losing one or two satellites was enough to bump back to RTK float. Bummer!

So to fix these two issues I moved the base station to my front yard which had a better view of the sky, and mounted the unit on the roof of my car, which I’ve heard makes an excellent ground plane. Whoever said that is right.

This was quite an improvement. I was able to run autonomous missions while maintaining an RTK fix for 80%+ of the time in the back yard.

The black tick marks is the position of the front caster as it runs a loop in my driveway.

I had the robot run an autonomous mission in circles in my driveway and the repeatability was still pretty good. The tick marks on the drive way indicate the position of the side of the front caster through each pass. The distance between the furthest two tick marks is 5in.

Overall, the Ardusimple boards are looking like a very good investment.